As a senior fellow, Claudia leads studies of educational programs, pre-K through higher education, including implementation studies that involve providing rapid feedback to schools and agencies to support program improvement, as well as randomized control trial (RCT) and quasi-experimental designs (QED) outcomes evaluations, with a special emphasis on working with stakeholders to interpret and use quantitative outcomes data for the improvement of programs and policies. Leveraging her over 25 years of experience conducting educational research for a wide range of local, state, and national agencies, Claudia ensures that the lessons learned from research and project deliverables are useful to a wide range of stakeholders.  She also uses her expertise in literacy education and assessment to enhance instrument development for NORC studies.

She currently co-leads a study for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that surveys a nationally representative sample of youth, ages 10-12, and teens, ages 13-17, about their experiences studying math and their math mindsets, with a focus on Black and Hispanic youth and teens, and those from low-income families. The goal is to obtain information from youth and teens that can help inform improvements in math education that foster equity. She also co-leads an RCT evaluation of Generation Citizen’s action civics program, under a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), that involves collecting in-depth information about the ways high school civics teachers implement this supplemental program and its impacts on students’ civics knowledge, critical thinking, and civics engagement. She also serves as a senior advisor to an evaluation study of an early literacy program (Kid Writing) being implemented in pre-K centers in Philadelphia, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, providing expertise in early literacy assessments.

Before joining NORC, Claudia led a national study of early literacy development for IES that involved collecting a range of literacy assessments from students in over 1,000 pre-K to grade 2 classrooms in ten school districts across the country, as well as conducting four rounds of classroom observations, with the goal of identifying the types of instructional practices that correlated to gains in student literacy development. She also led an evaluation study of the first five years of the Kauffman Charter School, that included an intensive implementation component (three site visits a year with classroom observations, teacher focus groups, administrator interviews, and surveys of parents, students, and teachers), and a QED outcomes study to monitor school progress towards its annual achievement goals.  This study included rapid feedback after site visits to help inform improvements and yearly progress reports, presented in formats useful to foundation funders, school administrators, and classroom teachers.